Sunder Katwala is Director of thinktank British Future. His new book How to be a patriot is published this month by Harper North.
Saturday’s Coronation offers a chance to see a thousand years of history come to life. The occasion will show that few countries place so much emphasis on tradition as the British, nor carry it off so well. Yet might their very longevity not make these Royal rituals – the sacred, the sublime, and occasionally the faintly ridiculous – seem almost like a conjuring trick as they seek the suspension of disbelief from this modern, sceptical, increasingly secular and individualistic society.
This will be the first Coronation that anybody younger than our 74-year-old King can remember. Only the 1953 Coronation is known enough to feature as a cultural reference point. The Kingdom in 2023 feels rather more disunited now than then: the polarising political clashes of the last decade have shown it to be a more anxious, fragmented and divided society than most of us would want it to be. There are different levels of appetite for this Coronation across the different nations of the UK too.
Taking a longer view, looking back beyond 1953, generates a different, perhaps counter-intuitive perspective. King Charles III is just the thirteenth British monarch since the Act of Union. Despite the challenges that he faces, the King arguably inherits a stronger Coronation hand that almost all his predecessors of these past three centuries, with his mother Queen Elizabeth II being the one clear exception.
The 1953 Coronation was a peak moment of national and social cohesion, coming soon after the Second World War had both ratified and reformed the British state. The earlier accessions of the early twentieth century took place during the constitutional crisis of 1910; in 1918 shortly after the revolution in Russia, as the Royal household anxiously assimilated its German roots to rebrand as the House of Windsor; and again in the wake of the abdication crisis of 1936. The Monarchy usually felt more fragile and contingent as the subsequent Coronations approached than it does at the beginning of this reign.
“The British persuaded themselves that they were good at ceremonial because they always had been,” David Cannadine has written. Yet his indispensable and entertaining study of Royal ritual shows that our sense of its timelessness is something of a modern mirage. Cannadine characterises the period from the 1820s to the 1870s as one of “ineptly performed ritual” with little public reach or appeal before its heyday in the age of Empire. For most of those thousand years, the Monarchy was mostly out of sight and out of mind for most of its subjects.
There were three key factors in how the modern monarchy extended its public reputation: powerlessness; opportunities from new technologies to broaden reach; and the search for a relevant purpose for a monarchy in each era.
Firstly, shedding the Crown’s political influence was crucial to improving its public reputation. For most of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, monarchs were treated with indifference or disdain. Has the Times ever published a more brutal obituary than that of George IV after his death in 1830? “There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow creatures,” it declared. One of King Charles’s early priorities, after his long and itchy half-century apprenticeship as Prince of Wales, was to signal that he understands and accepts the new constraints on his public voice as Monarch.
Secondly, despite Bagehot’s famous warning in the 1860s about the risks of ‘letting daylight in upon magic,’ each major new technology was a boon to the monarchy’s public engagement. Newspaper photography in the nineteenth century, radio broadcasts of the 1930s and television in 1953 gave a public reach to Royal ceremony that had previously been impossible. The last Coronation also represented, in its own time, a conscious effort to blend tradition and modernity – the symbolic start of a new Elizabethan age providing one key catalyst for the television era of mass communication.
This is an era of greater fragmentation and competition for attention, making national focal points more scarce. Major Royal events and the biggest sporting moments have few rivals in providing shared moments where twenty million or more of us still pay attention to the same thing at the same time.
Thirdly, the test of ‘relevance’ is whether the Crown can find a useful role in each era. Though its limited constitutional powers are fixed, its civic role can evolve. If the Empire gave the Monarchy a theme in the nineteenth century, overseeing its dignified dissolution into the Commonwealth became a central public theme for the late Queen.
The central theme of the 2023 Coronation is its conscious effort to blend tradition and change. The King has strongly multiculturalist instincts, after an era in which that language fell out of political fashion. The King’s sense of a “community of communities” is particularly about the multi-faith diversity of modern Britain. It is a more gradualist approach than his initial 1990s idea of becoming Defender of Faith.
The Coronation respects the integrity of a Christian Coronation service while finding several ways to reflect the multi-faith diversity of modern Britain. This may prove an opportunity as much as a challenge for the Established Church. The 2021 census results showed that all faiths in Britain are a minority faith now. With 46 per cent of people nominally identifying as Christian, a broader coalition – including around one in 10 who follow minority faiths – is needed to make the case for faith in public life.
The reinvention of tradition can sound like a pejorative term. But it should not be. We would not have any traditions if somebody, sometime, had not invented something – probably sensing that there were identity gaps to fill. Britain is not, as Tony Blair once suggested, a “young country”. So there may be a particular value not in inventing new traditions, but rather in gently repurposing and reinventing those that we already have.
In my new book, How to be a patriot, I set out a case as to how and why the Monarchy has the potential to become a stronger bridging institution in polarised times. Doing that successfully depends on the Monarchy being able to bridge in different directions at the same time – to use its thousand years of history to help reassure those worried about what the pace of change means for a shared society, as well as reaching those among minority groups anxious about their full acceptance in British society.
That bridging mission, reflected in this Coronation, could be how the monarchy finds a new purpose in our divided times. The new King can help to build and project an inclusive patriotism: one that does not ask people to pick a side between tradition and change, but instead seeks to knit them together into something people are proud to share.
Sunder Katwala is Director of thinktank British Future. His new book How to be a patriot is published this month by Harper North.
Saturday’s Coronation offers a chance to see a thousand years of history come to life. The occasion will show that few countries place so much emphasis on tradition as the British, nor carry it off so well. Yet might their very longevity not make these Royal rituals – the sacred, the sublime, and occasionally the faintly ridiculous – seem almost like a conjuring trick as they seek the suspension of disbelief from this modern, sceptical, increasingly secular and individualistic society.
This will be the first Coronation that anybody younger than our 74-year-old King can remember. Only the 1953 Coronation is known enough to feature as a cultural reference point. The Kingdom in 2023 feels rather more disunited now than then: the polarising political clashes of the last decade have shown it to be a more anxious, fragmented and divided society than most of us would want it to be. There are different levels of appetite for this Coronation across the different nations of the UK too.
Taking a longer view, looking back beyond 1953, generates a different, perhaps counter-intuitive perspective. King Charles III is just the thirteenth British monarch since the Act of Union. Despite the challenges that he faces, the King arguably inherits a stronger Coronation hand that almost all his predecessors of these past three centuries, with his mother Queen Elizabeth II being the one clear exception.
The 1953 Coronation was a peak moment of national and social cohesion, coming soon after the Second World War had both ratified and reformed the British state. The earlier accessions of the early twentieth century took place during the constitutional crisis of 1910; in 1918 shortly after the revolution in Russia, as the Royal household anxiously assimilated its German roots to rebrand as the House of Windsor; and again in the wake of the abdication crisis of 1936. The Monarchy usually felt more fragile and contingent as the subsequent Coronations approached than it does at the beginning of this reign.
“The British persuaded themselves that they were good at ceremonial because they always had been,” David Cannadine has written. Yet his indispensable and entertaining study of Royal ritual shows that our sense of its timelessness is something of a modern mirage. Cannadine characterises the period from the 1820s to the 1870s as one of “ineptly performed ritual” with little public reach or appeal before its heyday in the age of Empire. For most of those thousand years, the Monarchy was mostly out of sight and out of mind for most of its subjects.
There were three key factors in how the modern monarchy extended its public reputation: powerlessness; opportunities from new technologies to broaden reach; and the search for a relevant purpose for a monarchy in each era.
Firstly, shedding the Crown’s political influence was crucial to improving its public reputation. For most of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, monarchs were treated with indifference or disdain. Has the Times ever published a more brutal obituary than that of George IV after his death in 1830? “There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow creatures,” it declared. One of King Charles’s early priorities, after his long and itchy half-century apprenticeship as Prince of Wales, was to signal that he understands and accepts the new constraints on his public voice as Monarch.
Secondly, despite Bagehot’s famous warning in the 1860s about the risks of ‘letting daylight in upon magic,’ each major new technology was a boon to the monarchy’s public engagement. Newspaper photography in the nineteenth century, radio broadcasts of the 1930s and television in 1953 gave a public reach to Royal ceremony that had previously been impossible. The last Coronation also represented, in its own time, a conscious effort to blend tradition and modernity – the symbolic start of a new Elizabethan age providing one key catalyst for the television era of mass communication.
This is an era of greater fragmentation and competition for attention, making national focal points more scarce. Major Royal events and the biggest sporting moments have few rivals in providing shared moments where twenty million or more of us still pay attention to the same thing at the same time.
Thirdly, the test of ‘relevance’ is whether the Crown can find a useful role in each era. Though its limited constitutional powers are fixed, its civic role can evolve. If the Empire gave the Monarchy a theme in the nineteenth century, overseeing its dignified dissolution into the Commonwealth became a central public theme for the late Queen.
The central theme of the 2023 Coronation is its conscious effort to blend tradition and change. The King has strongly multiculturalist instincts, after an era in which that language fell out of political fashion. The King’s sense of a “community of communities” is particularly about the multi-faith diversity of modern Britain. It is a more gradualist approach than his initial 1990s idea of becoming Defender of Faith.
The Coronation respects the integrity of a Christian Coronation service while finding several ways to reflect the multi-faith diversity of modern Britain. This may prove an opportunity as much as a challenge for the Established Church. The 2021 census results showed that all faiths in Britain are a minority faith now. With 46 per cent of people nominally identifying as Christian, a broader coalition – including around one in 10 who follow minority faiths – is needed to make the case for faith in public life.
The reinvention of tradition can sound like a pejorative term. But it should not be. We would not have any traditions if somebody, sometime, had not invented something – probably sensing that there were identity gaps to fill. Britain is not, as Tony Blair once suggested, a “young country”. So there may be a particular value not in inventing new traditions, but rather in gently repurposing and reinventing those that we already have.
In my new book, How to be a patriot, I set out a case as to how and why the Monarchy has the potential to become a stronger bridging institution in polarised times. Doing that successfully depends on the Monarchy being able to bridge in different directions at the same time – to use its thousand years of history to help reassure those worried about what the pace of change means for a shared society, as well as reaching those among minority groups anxious about their full acceptance in British society.
That bridging mission, reflected in this Coronation, could be how the monarchy finds a new purpose in our divided times. The new King can help to build and project an inclusive patriotism: one that does not ask people to pick a side between tradition and change, but instead seeks to knit them together into something people are proud to share.